OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Semantically-aware population health risk analyses
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

One primary task of population health analysis is the identification of risk factors that, for some subpopulation, have a significant association with some health condition. Examples include finding lifestyle factors associated with chronic diseases and finding genetic mutations associated with diseases in precision health. We develop a combined semantic and machine learning system that uses a health risk ontology and knowledge graph (KG) to dynamically discover risk factors and their associated subpopulations. Semantics and the novel supervised cadre model make our system explainable. Future population health studies are easily performed and documented with provenance by specifying additional input and output KG cartridges.
Scaling Configuration of Energy Harvesting Sensors with Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), an increasing number of energy harvesting methods are being used to supplement or supplant battery based sensors. Energy harvesting sensors need to be configured according to the application, hardware, and environmental conditions to maximize their usefulness. As of today, the configuration of sensors is either manual or heuristics based, requiring valuable domain expertise. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to automate configuration and efficiently scale IoT deployments, but it is not yet adopted in practice. We propose solutions to bridge this gap: reduce the training phase of RL so that nodes are operational within a short time after deployment and reduce the computational requirements to scale to large deployments. We focus on configuration of the sampling rate of indoor solar panel based energy harvesting sensors. We created a simulator based on 3 months of data collected from 5 sensor nodes subject to different lighting conditions. Our simulation results show that RL can effectively learn energy availability patterns and configure the sampling rate of the sensor nodes to maximize the sensing data while ensuring that energy storage is not depleted. The nodes can be operational within the first day by using our methods. We show that it is possible to reduce the number of RL policies by using a single policy for nodes that share similar lighting conditions.
A General, Fault tolerant, Adaptive, Deadlock-free Routing Protocol for Network-on-chip
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The paper presents a topology-agnostic greedy protocol for network-on-chip routing. The proposed routing algorithm can tolerate any number of permanent faults, and is proven to be deadlock-free. We introduce a specialized variant of the algorithm, which is optimized for 2D mesh networks, both flat and wireless. The adaptiveness and minimality of several variants this algorithm are analyzed through graph-based simulations.
Bi-Objective Optimization for Energy Aware Internet of Things Service Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, service-oriented-based Internet of Things (IoT) has received massive attention from research and industry. Integrating and composing smart objects functionalities or their services is required to create and promote more complex IoT applications with advanced features. When many smart objects are deployed, selecting the most appropriate set of smart objects to compose a service by considering both energy and quality of service (QoS) is an essential and challenging task. In this paper, we reduced the problem of finding an optimal balance between QoS level and the consumed energy of the IoT service composition to a bi-objective shortest path optimization (BSPO) problem and used an exact algorithm named pulse to solve the problem. The BSPO has two objectives, minimizing the QoS including execution time, network latency, and service price, and minimize the energy consumption of the composite service. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach has short execution time in various complex service profiles. Meanwhile, it can obtain good performance in energy consumption and thus network lifetime while maintaining a reasonable QoS level.
Clustering Player Strategies from Variable-Length Game Logs in Dominion
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

We present a method for encoding game logs as numeric features in the card game Dominion. We then run the manifold learning algorithm t-SNE on these encodings to visualize the landscape of player strategies. By quantifying game states as the relative prevalence of cards in a player's deck, we create visualizations that capture qualitative differences in player strategies. Different ways of deviating from the starting game state appear as different rays in the visualization, giving it an intuitive explanation. This is a promising new direction for understanding player strategies across games that vary in length.
The Untold Secrets of Operational Wi-Fi Calling Services: Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Countermeasures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Since 2016, all of four major U.S. operators have rolled out nationwide Wi-Fi calling services. They are projected to surpass VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and other VoIP services in terms of mobile IP voice usage minutes in 2018. They enable mobile users to place cellular calls over Wi-Fi networks based on the 3GPP IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) technology. Compared with conventional cellular voice solutions, the major difference lies in that their traffic traverses untrustful Wi-Fi networks and the Internet. This exposure to insecure networks may cause the Wi-Fi calling users to suffer from security threats. Its security mechanisms are similar to the VoLTE, because both of them are supported by the IMS. They include SIM-based security, 3GPP AKA (Authentication and Key Agreement), IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), etc. However, are they sufficient to secure Wi-Fi calling services? Unfortunately, our study yields a negative answer. We conduct the first study of exploring security issues of the operational Wi-Fi calling services in three major U.S. operators' networks using commodity devices. We disclose that current Wi-Fi calling security is not bullet-proof and uncover four vulnerabilities which stem from improper standard designs, device implementation issues and network operation slips. By exploiting the vulnerabilities, together with several state-of-the-art computer visual recognition technologies, we devise two proof-of-concept attacks: user privacy leakage and telephony harassment or denial of voice service (THDoS); both of them can bypass the security defenses deployed on mobile devices and the network infrastructure. We have confirmed their feasibility and simplicity using real-world experiments, as well as assessed their potential damages and proposed recommended solutions.
Is it Safe to Drive? An Overview of Factors, Challenges, and Datasets for Driveability Assessment in Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

With recent advances in learning algorithms and hardware development, autonomous cars have shown promise when operating in structured environments under good driving conditions. However, for complex, cluttered and unseen environments with high uncertainty, autonomous driving systems still frequently demonstrate erroneous or unexpected behaviors, that could lead to catastrophic outcomes. Autonomous vehicles should ideally adapt to driving conditions; while this can be achieved through multiple routes, it would be beneficial as a first step to be able to characterize Driveability in some quantified form. To this end, this paper aims to create a framework for investigating different factors that can impact driveability. Also, one of the main mechanisms to adapt autonomous driving systems to any driving condition is to be able to learn and generalize from representative scenarios. The machine learning algorithms that currently do so learn predominantly in a supervised manner and consequently need sufficient data for robust and efficient learning. Therefore, we also perform a comparative overview of 45 public driving datasets that enable learning and publish this dataset index at https://sites.google.com/view/driveability-survey-datasets. Specifically, we categorize the datasets according to use cases, and highlight the datasets that capture complicated and hazardous driving conditions which can be better used for training robust driving models. Furthermore, by discussions of what driving scenarios are not covered by existing public datasets and what driveability factors need more investigation and data acquisition, this paper aims to encourage both targeted dataset collection and the proposal of novel driveability metrics that enhance the robustness of autonomous cars in adverse environments.
Effective Ways to Build and Evaluate Individual Survival Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

An accurate model of a patient's individual survival distribution can help determine the appropriate treatment for terminal patients. Unfortunately, risk scores (e.g., from Cox Proportional Hazard models) do not provide survival probabilities, single-time probability models (e.g., the Gail model, predicting 5 year probability) only provide for a single time point, and standard Kaplan-Meier survival curves provide only population averages for a large class of patients meaning they are not specific to individual patients. This motivates an alternative class of tools that can learn a model which provides an individual survival distribution which gives survival probabilities across all times - such as extensions to the Cox model, Accelerated Failure Time, an extension to Random Survival Forests, and Multi-Task Logistic Regression. This paper first motivates such "individual survival distribution" (ISD) models, and explains how they differ from standard models. It then discusses ways to evaluate such models - namely Concordance, 1-Calibration, Brier score, and various versions of L1-loss - and then motivates and defines a novel approach "D-Calibration", which determines whether a model's probability estimates are meaningful. We also discuss how these measures differ, and use them to evaluate several ISD prediction tools, over a range of survival datasets.
Composable Probabilistic Inference Networks Using MRAM-based Stochastic Neurons
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2018
Year: 2018

Magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) technologies with thermally unstable nanomagnets are leveraged to develop an intrinsic stochastic neuron as a building block for restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) to form deep belief networks (DBNs). The embedded MRAM-based neuron is modeled using precise physics equations. The simulation results exhibit the desired sigmoidal relation between the input voltages and probability of the output state. A probabilistic inference network simulator (PIN-Sim) is developed to realize a circuit-level model of an RBM utilizing resistive crossbar arrays along with differential amplifiers to implement the positive and negative weight values. The PIN-Sim is composed of five main blocks to train a DBN, evaluate its accuracy, and measure its power consumption. The MNIST dataset is leveraged to investigate the energy and accuracy tradeoffs of seven distinct network topologies in SPICE using the 14nm HP-FinFET technology library with the nominal voltage of 0.8V, in which an MRAM-based neuron is used as the activation function. The software and hardware level simulations indicate that a $784\times200\times10$ topology can achieve less than 5% error rates with $\sim400 pJ$ energy consumption. The error rates can be reduced to 2.5% by using a $784\times500\times500\times500\times10$ DBN at the cost of $\sim10\times$ higher energy consumption and significant area overhead. Finally, the effects of specific hardware-level parameters on power dissipation and accuracy tradeoffs are identified via the developed PIN-Sim framework.
Spectral Feature Transformation for Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

With the surge of deep learning techniques, the field of person re-identification has witnessed rapid progress in recent years. Deep learning based methods focus on learning a feature space where samples are clustered compactly according to their corresponding identities. Most existing methods rely on powerful CNNs to transform the samples individually. In contrast, we propose to consider the sample relations in the transformation. To achieve this goal, we incorporate spectral clustering technique into CNN. We derive a novel module named Spectral Feature Transformation and seamlessly integrate it into existing CNN pipeline with negligible cost,which makes our method enjoy the best of two worlds. Empirical studies show that the proposed approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on four public benchmarks by a considerable margin without bells and whistles.
Green Computer Science Millennial Students Examination
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Smartphones as one of information technology products have been affected higher education in various aspects. This article explains the useness of smartphones in facilitating online examination in information systems and computer science students. The research objective to be achieved by the researchers through the research, are as follows: 1) Utilizing smartphone as a media test online exam for green computing environment, 2) How to use social information technologies in online test, and 3) Explore the facilities or features that could be used for the online exam implementation. The observation was conducted with 100 students as respondents. Researcher used google forms to disseminate questions for online examination. The findings of the research showed that most the college students used Android OS for their online examination. Social technology like google forms has rich features in supporting online examination for computer science students. The use of smartphones, google forms, and facebook can create an atmosphere of modern, green computer science exams, efficient, and environmentally friendly.
Identity Preserving Generative Adversarial Network for Cross-Domain Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Person re-identification is to retrieval pedestrian images from no-overlap camera views detected by pedestrian detectors. Most existing person re-identification (re-ID) models often fail to generalize well from the source domain where the models are trained to a new target domain without labels, because of the bias between the source and target domain. This issue significantly limits the scalability and usability of the models in the real world. Providing a labeled source training set and an unlabeled target training set, the aim of this paper is to improve the generalization ability of re-ID models to the target domain. To this end, we propose an image generative network named identity preserving generative adversarial network (IPGAN). The proposed method has two excellent properties: 1) only a single model is employed to translate the labeled images from the source domain to the target camera domains in an unsupervised manner; 2) The identity information of images from the source domain is preserved before and after translation. Furthermore, we propose IBN-reID model for the person re-identification task. It has better generalization ability than baseline models, especially in the cases without any domain adaptation. The IBN-reID model is trained on the translated images by supervised methods. Experimental results on Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID show that the images generated by IPGAN are more suitable for cross-domain person re-identification. Very competitive re-ID accuracy is achieved by our method.
Theoretical Performance Limits of Massive MIMO with Uncorrelated Rician Fading Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

This work considers a multicell Massive MIMO network with $L$ cells, each comprising a BS with $M$ antennas and $K$ single-antenna user equipments. Within this setting, we are interested in deriving approximations of the achievable rates in the uplink and downlink under the assumption that single-cell linear processing is used at each BS and that each intracell link forms an uncorrelated MIMO Rician fading channel matrix; that is, with a deterministic line-of-sight (LoS) path and a stochastic non-line-of-sight component describing a spatial uncorrelated multipath environment. The analysis is conducted assuming that $N$ and $K$ grow large with a given ratio $N/K$ under the assumption that the data transmission in each cell is affected by channel estimation errors, pilot contamination, an arbitrary large scale attenuation and LoS components. Numerical results are used to prove that the approximations are asymptotically tight, but accurate for systems with finite dimensions under different operating conditions. The asymptotic results are also used to evaluate the impact of LoS components. In particular, we exemplify how the number of antennas for achieving a target rate can be substantially reduced with LoS links of only a few dBs of strength.
An Adversarial Approach for Explainable AI in Intrusion Detection Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Despite the growing popularity of modern machine learning techniques (e.g. Deep Neural Networks) in cyber-security applications, most of these models are perceived as a black-box for the user. Adversarial machine learning offers an approach to increase our understanding of these models. In this paper we present an approach to generate explanations for incorrect classifications made by data-driven Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). An adversarial approach is used to find the minimum modifications (of the input features) required to correctly classify a given set of misclassified samples. The magnitude of such modifications is used to visualize the most relevant features that explain the reason for the misclassification. The presented methodology generated satisfactory explanations that describe the reasoning behind the mis-classifications, with descriptions that match expert knowledge. The advantages of the presented methodology are: 1) applicable to any classifier with defined gradients. 2) does not require any modification of the classifier model. 3) can be extended to perform further diagnosis (e.g. vulnerability assessment) and gain further understanding of the system. Experimental evaluation was conducted on the NSL-KDD99 benchmark dataset using Linear and Multilayer perceptron classifiers. The results are shown using intuitive visualizations in order to improve the interpretability of the results.
Wireless Data Center Networks: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Data center networks (DCNs) are essential infrastructures to embrace the era of highly diversified massive amount of data generated by emerging technological applications. In order to store and process such a data deluge, today's DCNs have to deploy enormous length of wires to interconnect a plethora of servers and switches. Unfortunately, wired DCNs with uniform and inflexible link capacities expose several drawbacks such as high cabling cost and complexity, low space utilization, and lack of bandwidth efficiency. Wireless DCNs (WDCNs) have emerged as a promising solution to reduce the time, effort, and cost spent on deploying and maintaining the wires. Thanks to its reconfigurability and flexibility, WDCNs can deliver higher throughputs by efficiently utilizing the bandwidth and mitigate the chronic DCN problems of oversubscription and hotspots. Moreover, wireless links enhance the fault-tolerance and energy efficiency by eliminating the need for error-prone power-hungry switches. Accordingly, this paper first compares virtues and drawbacks of millimeter wave (mmWave), terahertz (THz), and optical wireless communications as potential candidates. Thereafter, an in-depth discussion on advances and challenges in WDCNs is provided including physical and virtual topology design, quality of service (QoS) provisioning, flow classification, data grooming, and load balancing. Finally, exciting research opportunities are presented to promote the prospects of WDCNs.
Partial Convolution based Padding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective padding scheme that can be used as a drop-in module for existing convolutional neural networks. We call it partial convolution based padding, with the intuition that the padded region can be treated as holes and the original input as non-holes. Specifically, during the convolution operation, the convolution results are re-weighted near image borders based on the ratios between the padded area and the convolution sliding window area. Extensive experiments with various deep network models on ImageNet classification and semantic segmentation demonstrate that the proposed padding scheme consistently outperforms standard zero padding with better accuracy.
An Application of Storage-Optimal MatDot Codes for Coded Matrix Multiplication: Fast k-Nearest Neighbors Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a novel application of coded computing to the problem of the nearest neighbor estimation using MatDot Codes [Fahim. et.al. 2017], that are known to be optimal for matrix multiplication in terms of recovery threshold under storage constraints. In approximate nearest neighbor algorithms, it is common to construct efficient in-memory indexes to improve query response time. One such strategy is Multiple Random Projection Trees (MRPT), which reduces the set of candidate points over which Euclidean distance calculations are performed. However, this may result in a high memory footprint and possibly paging penalties for large or high-dimensional data. Here we propose two techniques to parallelize MRPT, that exploit data and model parallelism respectively, by dividing both the data storage and the computation efforts among different nodes in a distributed computing cluster. This is especially critical when a single compute node cannot hold the complete dataset in memory. We also propose a novel coded computation strategy based on MatDot codes for the model-parallel architecture that, in a straggler-prone environment, achieves the storage-optimal recovery threshold, i.e., the number of nodes that are required to serve a query. We experimentally demonstrate that, in the absence of straggling, our distributed approaches require less query time than execution on a single processing node, providing near-linear speedups with respect to the number of worker nodes. Through our experiments on real systems with simulated straggling, we also show that our strategy achieves a faster query execution than the uncoded strategy in a straggler-prone environment.
A Review on Recommendation Systems: Context-aware to Social-based
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

The number of Internet users had grown rapidly enticing companies and cooperations to make full use of recommendation infrastructures. Consequently, online advertisement companies emerged to aid us in the presence of numerous items and users. Even as a user, you may find yourself drowned in a set of items that you think you might need, but you are not sure if you should try them. Those items could be online services, products, places or even a person for a friendship. Therefore, we need recommender systems that pave the way and help us making good decisions. This paper provides a review on traditional recommendation systems, recommendation system evaluations and metrics, context-aware recommendation systems, and social-based recommendation systems. While it is hard to include all the information in a brief review paper, we try to have an introductory review over the essentials of recommendation systems. More detailed information on each chapter will be found in the corresponding references. For the purpose of explaining the concept in a different way, we provided slides available on https://www.slideshare.net/MahdiSeyednejad/recommender-systems-97094937.